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An Outline of Skepticism

Richard H. Popkin at https://www.britannica.com/topic/skepticism. defined Skepticism in western philosophy as “the attitude of doubting knowledge claims set forth in various areas.” Skeptics challenge the adequacy or reliability of these claims by questioning the claims existing knowledge is based upon. Skeptics question whether any such claims really are indubitable or necessarily true. They consistently challenge the purported rational grounds of accepted assumptions. In everyday life, practically everyone is skeptical about some knowledge claims. However philosophical skeptics doubt the possibility of any knowledge beyond that of the contents of directly felt experience.

The original Greek meaning of skeptikos was “an inquirer,” someone who was unsatisfied and still looking for truth. From ancient times till now, skeptics have developed arguments to undermine the contentions of dogmatic philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Those arguments, and their employment against various forms of dogma, have played important roles in shaping both the problems and the solutions offered by western philosophy. As philosophy and science developed, doubts arose about various basic, widely accepted beliefs about the world. In ancient times, skeptics challenged the claims of Plato, Aristotle and their followers, as well as those of the Stoics. During the Renaissance, similar challenges were raised against the claims of Scholasticism and Calvinism. Later skeptics attacked Cartesianism (the system established by René Descartes) and other theories that attempted to justify the scientific revolution initiated by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. Later skeptical offensives were leveled against the theories of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel their followers. Each challenge led to new attempts to resolve the skeptical difficulties. Skepticism, especially since the Enlightenment, has come to mean disbelief-primarily religious disbelief-resulting in the skeptic being likened to the village atheist.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, the dean of Yale Law School, the president of the University of Chicago, and one of the more influential philosophers of education in the 20th century gave a series of lectures in 1951. In those lectures, he identified four intellectual trends that had been absolutely disastrous for modern education. He called these trends “the four horsemen of the philosophical apocalypse.”

“If the object of education is the improvement of men, any system of education that is without values is a contradiction in terms. A system that seeks bad values is bad. A system that denies the existence of values denies the possibility of education. Relativism, scientism, skepticism, and anti-intellectualism, the four horsemen of the philosophical apocalypse, have produced that chaos in education which will end in the disintegration of the West.”

In a January 23, 2017 article Daniel Lattier offered brief descriptions of each of “the four horsemen” and their impact on education:
1) Relativism:
The idea that notions of true and false, right and wrong, are purely subjective. Generally speaking, you can see its impact on education today through the exaltation of “tolerance” as the highest virtue, in addition to the changing of the purpose of education from helping students to pursue truth to the pragmatic goal of making them “college- and career-ready.”
2) Scientism:
The idea that the only true or meaningful knowledge is that gained through science. This has contributed to the significant weakening of the humanities curriculum and the decline of basic reading and writing skills at the expense of STEM education.
3) Skepticism:
For Hutchins, skepticism (related to relativism) referred to the idea that our beliefs are nothing more than “our own moods and humors, or, at the utmost, the local prejudices of our own country.” Therefore, according to this way of thinking, schools in Western countries such as America should not attempt to convince students of the truth of Western principles, or even worse, argue that some of these principles are superior to those of other cultures. Rather, they should simply teach students to “appreciate” other cultures.
4) Anti-Intellectualism:
As Isaac Asimov noted, “The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” Hutchins saw anti-intellectualism in the increasing resort to sentimentality in Western culture. Today, one sees it particularly manifested in schools in which students are encouraged to have opinions on matters of which they have little to no knowledge, and that the teacher’s job is merely to “affirm” these opinions.

Lattier stated, “These pernicious ideas have grown in strength since Hutchins wrote in 1951.” The four horsemen (harbingers of “the disintegration of the West”) of the “philosophical apocalypse” now permeate most public and private schools ranging from early childhood to even the most prestigious universities.

One need only observe the rise of (utopian) grievance groups such as modern activist feminists, Black Lives Matter and Antifa in recent years to see the effects of this permeation. The groups’ reigning narratives are strictly focused on the specific, personal perception of the aggrieved. These perceptions seem disconnected from the reality of cohesive logic and/or objective fact. This disconnect (and the groups’ members’ unwillingness to discuss or debate it) gives testimony to the power of methodical, systemic skepticism (as described by Hutchins), coupled with dogmatic devotion to the group’s particular ideology (see definition b of Idea, below.)

Another indication of the intellectual decay caused by the ‘four horsemen’ and their disciples is the deviation of ‘Skeptics’, particularly ‘internet skeptics’ from their intellectually philosophical forbearers. The true philosophical skeptics questioned everything to determine whether humanity could honestly know the truth about anything. This author refers the reader back to paragraph 2(two) for the meaning of ‘skepsis’ and skeptic.

The core concepts of ancient skepticism are belief, suspension of judgment, criterion of truth, appearances, and investigation. Important notions of modern skepticism such as knowledge, certainty, justified belief, and doubt play no or almost no role. Ancient debates addressed questions that today we associate with epistemology and philosophy of language, as well as with theory of action, rather than specifically with the contemporary topic of skepticism.

Modern skeptical views typically have either an epistemological form (focused on the epistemic status of certain beliefs) or focus instead on questions that are either local or radical. One common variety of modern skepticism concerns our beliefs about the past and argues that such beliefs lack positive epistemic status – that they are either not justified, not rational, or cannot constitute knowledge (perhaps two or even all three). Where skepticism does not have this epistemological focus, then it tends to be of an ontological form in that it is directed at beliefs about the existence of some supposedly problematic entity, such as the self or God. Here the target of the skepticism is not so much one’s putative knowledge of these entities (though it may be that as well), but rather the claim that they exist at all.

Local varieties of skepticism will only concern beliefs about a certain specific subject matter, such as beliefs in abstract objects or the conclusions of inductive arguments. Since ontological varieties of skepticism tend to be concerned with the existence of particular sorts of entities, they are usually (though not always) of this local form. In contrast, radical forms of skepticism afflict most of our beliefs and thus pose, at least potentially, the most pressing philosophical challenge.
The modern ‘skeptic’ community (both online and offline) grew out of Humanism and atheism, which established themselves as social movements in the mid-19th century. Some skeptics describe themselves as “joyfully debunking others’ outlandish truth-claims.” One universal is that skeptic can be, and often is, interchangeable with ‘atheist/antitheist’. Self-described as “…a remarkably successful informal learning movement, which has proved that people want to spend their leisure-time learning, discussing ideas and socializing.”

The growth of the ‘skeptic community’ has produced large and well-funded Skeptic organizations like the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the James Randi Educational Foundation. Calling themselves ‘freethinkers’ ‘rationalists’ or ‘scientistic’, they have morphed into political (see ‘The Geek Manifesto’) and social activists who seemingly have a single-minded drive to abolish religion as evidenced by poorly researched/plagaristic and dogmatic skeptic books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Jon Ronson and Richard Wiseman topping the bestseller list.
Perhaps the most telling trait of the ‘Skeptic Communities’ is their pathologic adherence to atheist dogma (in direct contradiction to their self-anointed label of skeptic/freethinker). Paul Kurtz, the founder of the movement, resigned “under duress” from CSICOP (by then called the Centre for Scientific Inquiry) after protesting against the organization’s “mean-spirited ridicule and criticism” of religion, including its sponsorship of ‘Blasphemy Day’. Under both the Classical and Contemporary definitions of ‘Skepticism’, it is nearly impossible to solidly adhere to any idea beyond “I don’t know.”

The philosophical definitions of an Idea are:
a) A concept developed by the mind.
b) A conception of what is desirable or ought to be; an ideal.
c) Platonism; .Also called form. An archetype or pattern of which the individual objects in any natural class are imperfect
copies and from which they derive their being.
d) Kantianism; Idea of pure reason. (1. Any of the three undemonstrable entities (a personal soul, a cosmos, and a supreme
being) implicit in the fact of a subject and an object of knowledge, and in the need for some principle uniting them.

The dogmatic adherence by certain groups to one or more of Hutchins’ ‘four horsemen’ ideologies has produced chaos in all Western societies. The chaos may largely be due to the groups’ rejection of the basic principles and ideals that are responsible for building and maintaining Western Civilization. The activists reject the free, advanced societies that allow them the freedom to reject and protest. Such cognitive dissonance is possible only if the activists have rejected the notion of objective Truth (below) in favor of Relativism (see above), as well as the other ‘horsemen’.

The definitions of Truth {trooth z, troths}
1. The true or actual state of a matter: He tried to find out the truth.
2. Conformity with fact or reality; verity: the truth of a statement.
3. A verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle, or the like: mathematical truths.
4. The state or character of being true.
5. Actuality or actual existence.
6. An obvious or accepted fact; truism; platitude.
7. Honesty; integrity; truthfulness.

For many, truth simply means that the ideas of the mind correspond with the reality outside of the person. This concept of truth can be traced back to Aristotle and Plato. It is more recently by St. Thomas Aquinas’ balanced formula “equation of thing and intellect.” His inclusion of the material was intended to leave room for the idea that “true” can be applied not only to thoughts and judgments but also to things or persons (e.g. a true friend). Since the Renaissance, philosophers have paid little attention to the correspondence theory. By that time, it was considered too obvious to merit much attention. However they did spell out a psycho-semantic connection between ideas and the parts of the physical world ‘connected’ to those same ideas.

Object-based correspondence became the norm through Plato’s pivotal engagement with the problem of falsehood. Only things that are show up in this account (eg, Robin flying): in the case of falsehood, (Robin sleeping) the ascribed state still is, but it is a state different from the one of reality. The account is extended from speech to thought and belief via Plato’s well known thesis that “thought is speech that occurs without voice, inside the soul in conversation with itself.

Fact-based correspondence theories became prominent only in the 20th century. These theories do not presuppose that the truth-bearing items have subject-predicate structure; indeed, they can be stated without any explicit reference to the structure of truth-bearing items. The theory offers an alternative response to the problem of falsehood, a response that may claim to extricate the theory of truth from the limitations imposed on it through the presupposition of subject-predicate structure.

Many correspondence theorists likely consider it inconceivable and/or foolishly brash to insist that something being “true” amounts to “corresponds with a fact”. Some simple forms of correspondence definitions of truth should be distinguished (“iff” means “if and only if”; the variable, “x”, ranges over whatever truthbearers are taken as primary; the notion of correspondence might be replaced by various related notions):
(1) x is true iff x corresponds to some fact;
x is false iff x does not correspond to any fact.
(2) x is true iff x corresponds to some state of affairs that obtains;
x is false iff x corresponds to some state of affairs that does not obtain.

Both forms invoke portions of reality-facts/states of affairs-that are typically denoted by clauses or by sentential gerundives, conditionally dependent upon variable facts/states of affairs. The difference between (2) and (1) is akin to the difference between Platonism about properties (embraces uninstantiated properties) and Aristotelianism about properties (rejects uninstantiated properties)

Definition of Certainty plural certainties
1: something that is certain
2: the quality or state of being certain especially on the basis of evidence

Definition of Reality Plural realities
1: the quality or state of being real
2a (1): a real event, entity, or state of affairs
• his dream became a reality
(2) a: the totality of real things and events
• trying to escape from reality
b: something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily
3: television programming that features videos of actual occurrences (such as a police chase, stunt, or natural disaster) –
often used attributively
• reality TV
• in reality: in actual fact

Popular refrains from the online ‘skeptic community’ regarding theism and religion include ‘no scientific evidence’ ‘bronze-age superstitions’ and so on. This writer wonders how, given the definitions for skeptic, truth, idea, perception, certainty and reality established by highly respected sources, the skeptic community can claim to truly know, or be certain of anything? The finest minds of History; from Socrates and Plato to Descartes and on into modernity, have struggled to reason their way to a solid platform of knowing anything with certainty. Some spent their live in that pursuit.
Socrates and other Classical Skeptics (brilliant enough for their writings to survive 2,000+ years) were unable to answer that question. How, then can any of the self-important, self-satisfied internet skeptics know that they are not in a brain-in-a-vat, plugged into the matrix or a simulation program in an advanced AI? How much less are they qualified to declare that there is no Creator?

That they declare it with absolute certainty as proof of their own superiority of intelligence, whether in their channel names, their words or their behavior speaks of vast ignorance. The first thing a true skeptic must absolutely question is their own assumptions biases and the reliability of their sources. The so-called ‘skeptics/freethinkers’ failure to do so, coupled with their obvious egotism, hostility to any who break ranks (such as Paul Kurtz), and hatred of traditional Western Values, especially religion, loudly states that the movement is an absolutist ideological cult. To quiet the autistic screeches about rejecting religion, I ask whether Charles Manson was a religious leader. No, he was not. Nor was Karl Marx, Stalin, Lenin or any of thousands of other personalities who have led millions of people to destruction via dogmatic credos throughout history.

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